Countdown: 35 weeks until the opening of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.

VANOC slow to get into new media game

Kris Krug is among a small group of Vancouver new media trailblazers aiming to revolutionize how the Olympic Games are covered in this wild Web 2.0 world.

They have devised the True North Media House, and they say it will also be strong and free.

It’s going to be a Downtown Eastside-based alternative for outlets big and small that don’t qualify to be inside the fence at the main media centre in the Vancouver Convention Centre or in the non-accredited provincial facility at Robson Square.

“With the explosive growth of online journalism, citizen journalism and new forms of journalism, we’re going to have huge demand for the services we’re offering there,” Krug said.

The concept was borne out of meetings last fall among disaffected members of the local new media community. Early on, VANOC was wide-eyed about the new media. Krug and others briefed VANOC executives and staff on a new media day back in 2005. But as the Games approached, things changed.

I remember Krug sitting crestfallen outside the Pan Pacific Hotel last November, ruing the fact that VANOC didn’t let him join in the world press briefing. That week, his Raincity Studios’ colleague Dave Olson extended a hand with his famous “Hello VANOC, we’re nice, local and invite you for a coffee and a talk” open letter.

Any VANOC forays into the virtual world have been on the coattails of telecommunications sponsor Bell. The Cultural Olympiad’s intriguing Canada CODE digital collage is the best example. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are used by many individuals at VANOC, but not VANOC itself.

The reluctance apparently comes from top-down. The IOC has tiptoed around the Internet, not fully embracing the new media. To its credit, it opened its own YouTube channel during the Beijing Games while liberalizing its rules to allow athlete blogs. Krug said the IOC’s top Canadian, Dick Pound, told him that the Internet is the second-biggest threat to the Olympics movement, after performance-enhancing drugs.

“They haven’t figured out how to harness the Internet, so they view it as a cannibalization of their broadcast revenues,” he said. “By not figuring out ways to engage the media, particularly the new media, they’re missing out on a whole generation.”

So Krug is intent on showing the IOC the potential.

“We have lots of people who are stoked abut it. You might have a Swedish ski blogger, and we’ll have the Christians blogging about Christians in the Olympics,” he said. “We’ll have other people who are probably anti-Olympics there, too. It’s like a big house, and everyone’s welcome in. It’s about open access for all these locked out, independent new media.”

NOTE: Respectfully shared in full for historical record and educational use. Original links and date intact for context.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia  As the winter sky fills with colors rarely seen since the Houston Astros dropped their rainbow jersey design, aspiring Olympic skiers fresh from their Cypress Mountain training runs pull off the road, pull out their cameras and take in the dazzling sunset over the Strait of Georgia.

“OK, I could live here,” said Crystal Lee, a Canadian national team skier from Ontario. “Just pitch a tent.”

This is what Vancouver will provide next year over past winter Olympic cities (and come to think about it, summer Olympic host cities, as well). Yes, Winter Games have been held in beautiful towns (Innsbruck, St. Moritz). And, yes, Winter Games have been held in major cities (Torino has almost as many people as Vancouver). But has any host provided the combination of mountain and sea views that leave you as breathless and weak-kneed as skiing a 10K cross-country race? And has any host been a vibrant metropolis renowned worldwide for its livability, diversity and vast capacity for showing a visitor a good time?

The posh ski village of Whistler will serve as the headquarters of many Winter Olympics events. Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images

Sorry, Innsbruck. You may have the Austrian Alps, but do you also have deep salt waters stretching from their slopes to the Pacific? Nice try, Torino, but does your industrial city — the Detroit of Italy — provide nearby ski slopes plunging to the city limits, thick emerald forests rising from the water and seaplanes taking off from the harbor? And sure, Salt Lake City, you have the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, but can you offer world-class restaurants with menus of every imaginable cuisine (the gold-medal favorite is the lamb Popsicle dish at Vij’s), plus a city rich in local wines and microbrews?

And that’s just Vancouver. Much of the 2010 Olympics competition will take place at Whistler, the posh ski village that 1998 gold-medal snowboarder Ross Rebagliati used in explaining his positive marijuana test at the Nagano Olympics — he attributed it to secondhand smoke he inhaled while living at Whistler.

In other words, Michael Phelps might be kicking himself that Vancouver is hosting the winter Olympics, not the Summer Games. Although Bode Miller should find it an outstanding venue.

“I grew up in Salt Lake, which did a great job with the Olympics in 2002,” said U.S. skeleton racer Zach Lund. “And Vancouver is going to do just as good a job or better, plus, there will be a fun atmosphere. It’s going to be great. I’m looking forward to getting here and enjoying it afterward.”

The third-largest city in Canada, the Vancouver metropolitan area has a population of just more than 2 million, and if you attend the Olympics next year, you may swear all of them are either competing with you for tickets or stuck in traffic ahead of you on the 75-mile Sea-to-Sky Highway that connects Vancouver to Whistler.

Threading its way past snowcapped peaks alongside the fjordlike Howe Sound, the first 37 miles to the town of Squamish rank among the most scenic roads in the world (cue the intoxicating NBC helicopter shot with the music swelling).

The highway is undergoing a major construction, expanding some sections to four lanes and adding a passing lane to others. Whether the construction is finished and how well it trims what is now a two-or-so-hour drive is important because many competitions — downhill and cross-country skiing, biathlon, ski-jumping and bobsled, luge and skeleton — will be held at Whistler. And traffic leading out of downtown Vancouver can back up in maddening fashion on normal days.

“Transportation is always a challenge,” said Maurice Cardinal, who runs olyblog.com, an often critical site dedicated to the Vancouver Olympics. “They’ve spent so much rebuilding the Sea-to-Sky Highway, and the reality is that it is the only road to Whistler.

“Because we do live on the ocean and there are a lot of waterways, there are only three bridges that connect Vancouver to the mainland side. The big problem is when there’s an accident on the bridge or an emergency like a jumper. When traffic shuts the bridge down, it shuts the city down.

“But I don’t think it’s going to be any worse than at other Olympics.”

Besides, the scenery is so beautiful along the drive to Whistler that you won’t mind getting stuck in traffic. Well, not so much.

Tickets and lodging also will be challenging. With several million people living in the area and another roughly 4 million within a three-hour drive (not counting border delays) from Seattle, Vancouver set records for ticket demand and sales during the first purchasing phase.

Another (smaller) phase of ticket sales will open this spring on cosport.com, but my experience covering eight previous Olympics has been that there are always tickets to be had. Or, more important, that has been the experience of my wife, who has not enjoyed the access of a media credential. An excellent ticket source is the official sponsor groups, which often have spare tickets when someone doesn’t show up. Hitting up these groups as they get off the bus at the venue can be a good way of getting a cheaper ticket, especially is you want only one seat.

Of course, as the investment companies point out, past results are no guarantee of future performance. And with hockey’s popularity in Canada, you better come with a mighty thick wallet plus plasma to sell (and perhaps incriminating photos of Sidney Crosby) if you want to see a game.

Cardinal said Vancouver has a shortage of hotel rooms compared to many major cities because it is a relatively young city. Horror stories about room availability and prices are as traditional a part of the Olympics countdown as the torch relay, however, and rooms can open up as you get closer to games. My wife got a room in Torino, for example, at the last moment for less than $200. That’s not inexpensive, to be sure, but it is significantly cheaper than some of the advance packages at Cosport.com that can go for more than $7,000 for four hotel nights and five events. And that’s PER PERSON BASED ON DOUBLE OCCUPANCY so it would be more than $14,000 for a couple.

At those prices, you would be better off staying in Seattle and having servants carry you to Vancouver in a sedan chair. More realistic options are renting from a private individual through craigslist. And if you’re willing to go farther afield, you can try Bellingham, Wash., (a wonderful college town about an hour’s drive from Vancouver) or other towns near the border.

Then again, getting to Vancouver from Washington state may be a problem. The U.S.-Canadian border crossing 30 or so miles from downtown Vancouver also is undergoing construction. During a recent trip, I sailed right through the crossing in less than five minutes. But waiting 30 minutes or more is common, and endurance waits of more than an hour are not unusual during peak traffic. The surest way to lessen your wait is to apply for a NEXUS card (for information click here), which gives access to special lanes for expedited crossing.

Plus, you better hope the Canadian dollar is closer to the current exchange rate of 82 cents to the U.S. dollar rather than the even par of a year ago, because Whistler is pack-multiple-credit-cards-and-increase-their-limits expensive even with a favorable exchange. A seafood crepe recently cost $24 at a restaurant well away from the slopes, pints of beer fetched about $7 at an Irish pub and a souvenir shop wanted $45 for a friggin’ Olympic cowbell.

Oh, and did I mention that it probably will be raining in Vancouver?

So, right now, you might be thinking that it would be easier to get to Vancouver next February if you start training and actually qualify for an Olympic team (I would suggest curling over, say, the downhill). And, yes, some money, effort and patience will be required.

But you won’t regret it when you’re whisking from Whistler to Blackcomb in the Peak-to-Peak gondola with the valley floor 1,500 feet beneath you and snowcapped mountains filling the horizon before you. Or when you’re clanging your cowbell and cheering Lindsey Vonn as she flies down the face of a mountain at speeds that should get her pulled over by the state patrol. Or when you’re sharing a brew (I recommend a pint from Granville Island Brewing) and singing “The Happy Wanderer” with your new best friends — the greatest guys in the world! — from Sweden, Japan, Austria, Bulgaria, Slovenia and Australia.

That’s the beauty of the Olympics: They thrill and they entertain and they provide friendships and memories that last long after your spouse tosses out the $30 souvenir T-shirt. No matter which country you call home, you’ll feel such a spirit of brotherhood that you’ll consider yourself a citizen of the world.

Although you may, like Crystal Lee, want to become a citizen of Vancouver. Especially when you’ve got a couple of Granville Island Maple Cream Ales in you.

NOTE: Respectfully shared in full for historical record and educational use. Original links and date intact for context.

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There’s been plenty of talk lately about how social media creators will fit in with the 2010 Olympics. Dave Olson wrote an open letter to VANOC Media Relations and Press Operations:

In brief, we’d like to have a conversation about how to allow fans and amateur media makers to document their Olympic experience while keeping out of the way of the IOC IP lawyers…

We are aware of your obligations to media rights holders and are seeking to provide an entirely different sort of coverage than the accredited media provide. We are not looking to cover events per se but are instead interested in covering the cultural stories, athletes’ families’ stories, and stories from fans who saved and traveled from around the world for this experience.

This feels like a good place to start. As Dave says, social media types aren’t expecting all-access passes to the gold medal hockey games. He’s right to point out that there’s a big hole to fill in the media coverage for such an event. I was thinking about it, and drew this little Venn diagram:

The CTVs and CBCs are going to have the major, breaking news covered. It’s all that green space–that’s where social media creators can live. Through various channels, I’m seeing several ways forward for benefits for both parties. Social media creators get some tools, resources and access to help with their citizen journalism efforts, and VANOC enjoys a whole new layer of news coverage. Such a partnership would also highlight Vancouver’s place as a global for new media, citizen journalism and the like.

NOTE: Respectfully shared in full for historical record and educational use. Original links and date intact for context.

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Dear Visitor,

Welcome to Vancouver. You are visiting one of the greatest cities in the world: eye-popping scenery, efficient services, moderate climate, relaxed and diverse population.

The United Nations survey on livability rates Vancouver in the top handful of cities on earth. And this year we’re hosting the Winter Olympics! What a great opportunity to enjoy Vancouver’s attractions — including all the Olympic legacies, like new stadiums, highways and tourist sights.

But one legacy that isn’t so enjoyable is the thousands of homeless people on the streets of Vancouver. You can’t help seeing them as you walk around downtown, and in many other neighbourhoods around the city.

This is shameful situation; visitors in 2010 are being treated to a city with almost as many homeless people as athletes competing in the Games!

Grinding poverty and growing homelessness are happening despite some bold promises to create a positive Olympic legacy — promises such as building more social housing, reducing homelessness, and not displacing poor people to make way for Olympics-driven development.

We are so proud of these games that we asked the International Olympic Committee to make these games part of the official 2010 program. The fact that they didn’t did not deter the 600 Poverty Olympics fans from attending! We hope that shining the international spotlight on the dark side of our prosperous city and province might finally convince our governments to take action.

We hope, dear visitor, that you’ll take a few minutes to look around… Learn more about the poverty amid plenty… Help us make change by taking some simple actions… And don’t forget to invite your friends to visit our fair city!

Note: Article shared here in full for historical record. Original article link is broken, as such, accessed from Gamesbids.com forum, Feb. 2017. Posted with original publication date to place in context.

VANCOUVER — Vancouver comes by its party town reputation honestly, but enough is enough, according to the International Olympic Committee.

The sober-minded IOC has told the city to scale back its plans to party, party, party during the coming 2010 Winter Olympics.

“They’ve made the observation that we may not need as much as is being planned, because there is a lot,” VANOC executive vice-president Dave Cobb said yesterday.

The IOC was concerned that the swath of live sites and celebration areas originally set aside for the 17-day event was more than at any previous Summer or Winter Olympics, Mr. Cobb said.

Spurred by the added impetus of the current economic downturn, he said Olympic organizers have taken IOC concerns to heart. “They have done this many more times than the rest of us, so I think this is a good time for everybody to take a final, last look at what the plans are, and make sure that the scope is appropriate.”

With three significant Olympic sites – the media centre, GM Place (hockey) and BC Place (opening, closing and medal ceremonies) – fairly close together in the city’s dense downtown, large areas have been set aside for the general public to enjoy the atmosphere of the Games without buying a ticket.

“There’s no doubt that the downtown is going to be very active during the Games,” said Dave Rudberg, outgoing general manager of Olympic operations for the city. “This is something that Vancouver has never experienced before, and we are encouraging people to come downtown and take in the celebrations.”

However, a shortage of sponsorship money prompted city council this week to slash Olympic spending on public entertainment to $18-million, a cut of $5-million from its previous budget.

The city is planning two live sites downtown, featuring entertainment, large video screens to show Games events and other Olympic-related activity. But officials are not ruling out consolidating everything to a single site, if money continues to be hard to come by.

In addition to the city’s live sites, the province, VANOC and a myriad of corporate sponsor hospitality tents will take up space downtown. Large sections of major thoroughfares Granville Street and Robson Street are earmarked for pedestrian-only use during the Games.

Streets in the immediate vicinity of BC Place and GM Place, to be renamed Canada Hockey Place for the Olympics, will also be blocked off.

Mr. Cobb was not specific about what celebratory activities might be cut back. “But it’s something we are all looking at right now.”

“For us, it’s business as usual,” said John McLaughlin, chief financial officer for VANOC. “But there are challenging times ahead … and we remain prudent in our economic management. We try to be careful all the time. … It’s not magic [what we are doing].”

Despite selling out its first ticket offering to the public, VANOC took in just $94-million in revenue from the sales, well short of the $270-million total it hopes to reap. The large gap indicates how many tickets are set aside for members of the Olympic Family, usually national Olympic committees, which has yet to buy its share.

Mr. Cobb said plans are well under way for a second batch of Olympic tickets to be offered to the public some time this summer.

Article about social media making at Olympics in Vancouver’s TheTyee.ca by Geoff Dembicki, Mar. 23, 2009. Features Robert Scales and Kris Krug and their exploits in China during Beijing 2008 Olympics.

Shared in full for context, posterity and permanent record.

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‘You cannot stop people from recording’: Raincity’s Robert Scales.

‘You cannot stop people from recording’: Raincity’s Robert Scales.Robert Scales stands on a bustling Chinese sidewalk and waves a thin, greenish stick in front of the camera. “We’re at the street food market,” he says. “And this is snake.”

He takes a bite. Strings of white flesh stretch taut from his mouth. “It tastes like squid almost, or something.”

During the Beijing Summer Games, Scales walked the streets with cameras in hand, capturing the sights and sounds of a city gripped by Olympics frenzy.

He shot dozens of YouTube videos, wrote a fan diary for the BBC and uploaded daily photos to Flickr. He wanted to share his experiences with the world.

When Vancouver’s own Olympics hit town next year, the self described “gonzo journalist” and head of locally based social media company Raincity Studios wants to do it all again.

The Tyee is supported by readers like you

But this time around, Scales will be part of a phenomenon on the verge of breaking huge.

Internet rules more lax than in China and a rapid proliferation of recording devices and open-source websites could mark a turning point for social media — a prospect that has some of Vancouver’s most active new media pioneers counting down the days.

“2010 is the junction,” Scales told The Tyee. “I’m a fervent believer that that moment in time is going to change how we play this game.”

What is social media?

In the shift from traditional media forms to something entirely new, crowd-generated content is everything. On sites such as Facebook, Flickr, and Blogspot, hundreds of millions of people connect daily to share personal experiences and document the world around them.

Kris Krug, a colleague of Scales’ who blogged the Olympics in Torino and Beijing, said the idea of social media is as old as the Internet itself — and changing just as fast. He traced a clear line through pre-Internet bulletin boards to community forums in the ’90s — from the first wave of blogging in the early 2000s to multimedia platforms such as YouTube. And most recently, the real-time updates of Twitter and Facebook.

If today’s numbers are any indication, the trend is growing exponentially. Technorati has indexed 133 million blogs since 2002, Facebook boasts over 175 million active users and YouTube draws enough Americans each month to dwarf domestic Superbowl ratings.

The open source explosion is being fueled by an abundance of smart phones — advanced mobile devices often featuring Internet and video — which have made it simpler than ever to enter the public dialogue.

“Things are getting easier, cheaper, faster and more ubiquitous,” Krug said. “If you can publish a video report to your blog in real-time you essentially have a television station in your pocket.”

Why Beijing wasn’t a turning point

When Krug and Scales attended the 2006 Games in Torino, the world of social media was just awakening to its potential. High-speed Internet and record bandwidth allocation made it possible to publish videos of informal street hockey games and informal interviews with Canadians abroad.

But the technology and the amount of people using it wasn’t quite advanced enough to propel social media coverage into the mainstream, Krug said.

In the years to follow, a Wi-Fi boom and the wide-scale adoption of mobile units such as the iPhone — which has sold roughly 13.7 million units since its 2007 debut — blew the door open for real-time events coverage.

As the Beijing Olympics approached, it looked like social media could be poised to transform the way big events are documented. The Summer Games did see an unprecedented level of amateur coverage, but Internet restrictions limited its impact.

Bloggers, podcasters, cell phone videographers and social network users were dismayed to find that China blocked platforms such as WordPress and Blogspot, while Facebook access was unreliable, Krug said.

“They crushed the infrastructure which the social media movement is built on,” he said. “While the technology had advanced from Torino, and the amount of people doing it there had advanced from Torino, I don’t think we quite saw Beijing fully harness the power of the age that is available.”

A new model for news coverage?

Four years ago, Vancouver local Michael Tippett started NowPublic.com with the goal of building the world’s largest news organization. These days, his site is a global locus of citizen journalism, with 170,000 members and up to 60,000 contributors each month.

The concept is a mix of social and information networks, where amateur news creators armed with their own recording technology share videos, photos and written reports from all corners of the planet.

At its best, this sort of coverage is more timely and visceral than traditional outlets can offer, Tippett said. When armed extremists gunned down tourists and residents in Mumbai last fall, live Twitter updates and on-the-scene footage brought the carnage to the world. In its 2008 wrap-up, NowPublic ranked the attacks as the most important user-generated news story of the year.

“You’re finding that stories as they break are being told by people on the ground,” Tippett said.

During the 2010 Games, anyone with a personal-recording device and an eye for breaking news can upload content to NowPublic. The site will also feature the sort of coverage Scales and Krug have helped pioneer for the past two Games: tourists experiencing Chinatown for the first time, on-the-street interviews with family members of competing athletes. “There are no limits,” Tippett said, “as long as it’s quality.”

“What happens to the overflow?”

There’s no doubt come 2010, Vancouver will be a media circus. On top of the 10,000 accredited media anticipated by VANOC, a further 3,000 “unaccredited” passes will be issued by the British Columbia International Media Centre.

Scales was accepted into this second group, and plans to show up at Robson Square Plaza each day for official briefings and meetings with other reporters — though he’ll be barred from all Olympic venues. As thrilled as he was to receive access, he’s concerned that untold legions of bloggers, citizen journalists and tech-savvy spectators won’t benefit from the same resources.

“What happens to the overflow?” Scales asked. “Are they not entitled to cover the same stories? Are they not entitled to have a space to collaborate?”

For the past few months, Scales and Krug have participated in talks aimed at starting an alternative media centre. The True North Media House is still a work in progress, but could see 500 Games-time passes issued to everyone from international broadcasters to figure skating bloggers. Scales and Krug envision a social media hub where pros and amateurs trade sources, avail themselves of speedy upload technology and gain access to First Nations, protest and cultural groups outside of conventional channels.

“There’s going to be all these people who aren’t sports journalists who are here to figure out what Vancouver’s about,” Krug said. “The centre is about harnessing all these individuals doing alternative or outsider coverage of the Games.”

Up against the IOC

Advocates of social media often portray citizen-led coverage as a phenomenon that takes place outside traditional outlets. But come Games-time, official broadcasters still get to call the shots.

This year, the CTV-Rogers Olympic consortium caused jaws to drop when it paid the highest price in Canadian history to broadcast the 2010 Olympics. For $90 million (U.S.), the group secured exclusive rights to air events and results in Canada — and a squadron of IOC lawyers.

In the lead-up to the Beijing Games, the committee released a set of blogging guidelines — to be updated in April — that recognized the legitimacy of the medium, but placed restrictions on its scope.

“The dissemination of moving images of the Games through any media, including display on the Internet, is a part of the IOC’s intellectual property rights,” say the rules.

“The IOC reserves the right to take any and all other measure(s) it deems fit with respect to infringements of these Guidelines, including taking legal action for monetary damages and imposing other sanctions.”

If material coming out of the True North Centre falls into IOC crosshairs, Scales will be quick to comply with official orders. But given the realities of today’s social media landscape, the IOC may end up fighting a losing battle.

“You cannot stop people from taking pictures with their cell phones, you cannot stop people from recording,” Scales said. “It’s too much. There’s no way they’ll be able to monitor it all.”

Support social media, boost ad revenues

Rather than limit the amount of social media coverage coming out of the Games, the IOC and official broadcasters should encourage it, argued Michael Geist, a leading expert in digital policy and law based at the University of Ottawa.

His reasoning is simple. Networks need viewers to sell advertising, so the more people engaged with the Olympics, the more potential revenue.

“They ought to recognize that there’s great opportunities to increase interest in their broadcasts,” Geist said.

The main argument against them is that amateur recordings could erode the Olympic brand and steal viewers from rights holders. But Geist countered there’s little chance a grainy cell phone video of a Games event can compete with the official high-definition footage broadcast from coast to coast.

So instead of wasting resources in a broad clampdown, he said, organizers should push athletes, spectators and bloggers to document their own eye-level Games experiences, and aggregate the content on an ad-friendly platform.

To date, VANOC and the IOC have been unreceptive to a Games-sponsored social media website, Scales said. But the social media phenomenon is gaining so much momentum, he thinks it’s only a matter of time before organizers recognize the inevitable.

“The trend is going to be massive,” he said. “Just as was the adoption of the cell phone and the microwave and the automobile.”